Week 9 Assignments

My E-Prime Day

Standard English

“While I was sitting in front of my desk today writing my last physics assignment I suddenly realized that I have been working and studying in San Fransisco for over three and a half years.” 

E-Prime

“While I was sitting in front of my desk today writing my last physics assignment I suddenly realized that it appears that I have been working and studying in San Fransisco for over three and a half years.”

Then when I started to think about what the difference is between this E-Prime sentence and the standard English I just wrote I decided to have some fun and make as many primes as possible out of the E-Prime sentence.

E-Prime Prime Prime and more Prime : )

“It appears that while the physical person that I believe to be myself seems to be sitting in front of what this physical person believed to be his desk at a day that appears to be today who seems to be writing what appears to be his last physics assignment he seems to suddenly realize that it appears that he seems to have been doing what appears to be work and study in a city that seems to be San Fransisco for what appears to be three and a half years.”

And by taking the original standard English to this level of primes highlights the fact that, It is very difficult if not impossible to only speak about what we actually know of the world and our experience of it.  They are much more uncertain than what we are accustomed to. 

  

Synthesizing Physics-”As above, so below”

Physics is not only the study of the objective physical world but also the study of the subject that is able to experience it.  Western physics has until recently focused exclusively on the former but has slowly coming to the realization that objects cannot exist independently from the experiencing subject.

Week 8 Assignments

Newton’s Three Laws and me

I feel that there is a beauty and simplicity in Newton’s three laws.  It is also fascinating  to realize that these three simple laws are very much responsible for the modern industrial revolution and technological advancements in virtually all areas of our lives.  I look forward to the day we come up with such simple and beautiful laws for the whole universe and life itself. 

Our “Energy Efficient” Culture

To be efficient is to efficient towards a certain goal.  I feel like our culture today is very efficient at achieving various goals that it sets its mind to.  However whether these goals are inherently valuable or not is much less examined.  What I believe is the case is that often many of these goals can contradict each other on many levels.   For instance short terms goals may contradict long term goals. Goals of different levels such as individual, family, company, province, nation, world, environment and etc. might also contradict either other.  And when this happens the efficiency of achieving one goal  can make the achievement of a contradictory and perhaps even more important goal at a different level that much more difficult.  One of the most clear examples is the super efficiency that we achieve in exploiting natural resources and mass producing various products makes protecting our environment that much harder.  What this means is that even though we might be energy efficient at achieving individual goals we might be very energy inefficient overall.

Descartes has a lot to answer for!

Descartes is indeed an advocate of reductionism and a mechanistic model of the universe.  However to blame Descartes on our adoption of his theories is perhaps unfair.  A more useful approach might be to ask what factors bring our cultures and ourselves into adopting reductionism and a mechanistic model of the universe.  What are the reasons that the teachings of other schools of thoughts have not been accepted by us and brought into the mainstream.  Eventually we might realize that Descartes may only be a spokes person for the mistaken assumptions and illusions that we long hold dear.       

Week 7 Assignments

“Ordered Chaos”-does this sound familiar?

Fractals as patterns of complex systems

The term “ordered chaos” succinctly spells out the essence of chaos theory as well as fractal patterns.  A definition of chaos theory is “the qualitative study of unstable aperiodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamical systems.”  Before chaos theory we all equate deterministic behavior with predictability.  However what chaos theory shows is that this is not the case.  A system can be deterministic and at the same time unpredictable because its behavior is aperiodic and unstable.  And fractal patterns demonstrates to us visually and hence in real life how simple the mathematical equations for a deterministic system can be before its behavior is no longer predicable even with the use of the most advanced computers.

Consciousness out of Chaos?

I think consciousness can be defined in two ways.  The first is the subject that is able to experience the world, both the outer physical world as well as the inner mental and emotional world.  The second is a collection of the various inner emotions and thoughts of a physical person. And for the vast majority of people through these various inner emotions and thoughts emerges an illusion of an unified individual ego or an “I”.  

As the subject that is able to experience the world consciousness is qualitatively different from the experienced world.  It has no shape, weight, size, texture, location and so on that we normally associate an physical object with.  It also has none of the qualities of our emotions and thoughts.  To the extent that chaos is part of our objective world, either outer or inner, it is not part of our consciousness which is the subject that is able to experience this chaos.  In short consciousness and chaos are two necessary and yet different parts of our experience and no part can arise from the other.

Only as an illusion of an unified individual ego or an “I” we can say that consciousness comes out of chaos.  It is only through experiencing the world in its various aspects, both outer and inner, that we can experience the ego or an I.  In this sense “I” is nothing but the collection of experience and nothing more.  The fact that we feel that there is an “I” as an individual object above and beyond the collection of experience is a very fundamental illusion that Buddhism tries to dispel.  In short the “consciousness” that comes out of chaos is only an illusion of an “I” or individual ego which does not exist.